Recently viewed films

so lacklustre · Post by **so lacklustre** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 2:11 pm

Candy is not used over here to describe sweets. We just use sweets as a broad term to describe most confectionary. We do have Candy Floss which is the big pink whirly sugary stuff that gets stuck to your face but tastes great if you're at a funfair.

Boy With A Problem · Post by **Boy With A Problem** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 2:18 pm

AKA Cotton Candy

mood swung · Post by **mood swung** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 2:22 pm

aka edible r-20 insulation.

selfmademug · Post by **selfmademug** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 2:25 pm

so lacklustre wrote:Candy is not used over here to describe sweets.

I believe you but that's the word Roald Dahl used in his books (he does also use 'sweets'). Mind-bogglingly enough, Amazon provides an online concordance to the book and cites use of the word on 38 pages. See:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0141301 ... rch-inside

Otis Westinghouse · Post by **Otis Westinghouse** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 8:01 pm

And if you've enjoyed Dahl's beautiful own reading of the story (as with all his recordings), you will know how wonderful he makes the word 'candy' sound. The dollars thing (and candy too, if you please) helps dislocate the thing further. It's kind of set in England but not really, Wonka's accent is mostly American but not entirely, it's mostly contemporary in setting but the NY chocolate buying frenzy is set in the 50s. I love this effect.

One thing Dahl does superbly well and brings it out further in his reading is the deliciousness of candy (

). When you hear him describe Charlie eating the bar you can almost taste that yourself, and yet you know you can never taste a bar that will be as good as that sounds. Add extreme hunger, as Mug points out, and it's too perfect for words. The Giraffe, The Peli and Me contains loads of utterly brilliant imagined candies - well worth investigating the recording just to hear that. The Buckets don't look anything like hungry enough. Burton goes for something of a fairy tale image of poverty, which I think takes from it.

PlaythingOrPet · Post by **PlaythingOrPet** » Thu Aug 04, 2005 4:30 am

Dollars, pants (meaning trousers), WW saying 'dodgy', vacation, candy, yadda, yadda. Who cares? I usually hate it when American English infiltrates Brit English and vice versa, but it worked well in this. Burton can do no wrong, Planet of the Apes being an exception.

Now, when is Corpse Bride released?

Otis Westinghouse · Post by **Otis Westinghouse** » Thu Aug 04, 2005 2:02 pm

I saw a trailer for that back to back with Charlie ATCF the first time, and it was funny how you knew straight away this was going to be Tim Burton again. Amazing number of actors in common with Charlie. Did they just do both in parallel to economise on costs?

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Thu Aug 04, 2005 8:37 pm

BlueChair wrote:I think the next cinema experience for me will be Broken Flowers, the latest Jim Jarmusch film starring Bill Murray, which won 2nd prize at Cannes. Opens on Friday.

This sounds like a good one, Blue. I've always been a fan of Jarmusch, ever since Stranger Than Paradise. Even some of his less critically acclaimed films, such as Ghost Dog, have been appealing.

Murray's really on a roll right now, with Lost In Translation, The Life Aquatic (which I saw on the way over to Australia) and now this new picture. It's good to see him experiencing this renaissance. I always thought he had a lot more in him than pure comedy.

miss buenos aires · Post by **miss buenos aires** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 8:52 am

I saw "The Aristocrats" the other night. Really fucking funny.

selfmademug · Post by **selfmademug** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 10:08 am

I can't wait to see that, but so far it's not playing in Boston. Will probably see Broken Flowers over the weekend, and maybe one other, with my buddy Jim. I've heard Batman Begins is really good; maybe I'll see that.

bobster · Post by **bobster** » Fri Aug 05, 2005 12:18 pm

miss buenos aires wrote:I saw "The Aristocrats" the other night. Really fucking funny.

Well, if I may quote myself. "It's...motherfucking funny." (Which, as I also point out here is appropriate because the above referenced act is one of the less revoting acts frequently mentioned in the movie.)

If you're a sucker for punishment -- http://www.filmthreat.com/Reviews.asp?Id=6811

El Vez · Post by **El Vez** » Sat Aug 06, 2005 1:22 pm

Wedding Crashers - My take is pretty much the exact opposite of Bobster's. I loved the opening, particularly the Dwight Yoakum and Rebecca DeMornay showdown, and it fell apart once they got to Walken's house. At that point, it just became sloppy and nonsensical for me. Vince Vaughn's character undergoes a *radical* change of heart that felt profoundly unconvincing and the way Owen Wilson's character, after he was found out as a "wedding crasher," stalked and obsessed over the would-be love of his life made him look like an unstable creep rather than sympathetically lovelorn. The Will Ferrell cameo was great, dark fun though.

The Devil's Rejects - I loved this movie. It falls apart in the last thirty minutes (horror films and comedies tend to do that) but up until that point, it's a vicious, well made B movie. I appreciate how Rob Zombie depicts violence with a cold eye that forbids you from getting off on it or thinking it's cool. The acting is way above average for this kind of film and I hope that Sid Haig gets some more work thrown his way because he's got this demonic charisma about him and a way with line delivery that's on par with Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones.

The Bad News Bears - Billy Bob Thornton should be in every family film because, even when he's giving the "We're a team" speech, you can tell he's thinking to himself "I hope Chastity is working tonight." I wish that the studio would have let Thornton and Richard Linklater go balls out and make a hard R movie, one that would really give that douche Michael Medved something to cry about, but it's still a fun Not Quite So Bad Santa.

Batman Begins - Didn't like this one as much as I thought I would. Maybe it was the lack of a central, completely hissable villain. Ever since Nicholson's Joker, they always hedge their bets by giving us two, three or four villains per Batman. Stop it. If they had stuck with Cillian Murphy's *extremely* creepy Scarecrow and jettisoned the weird ass plot to destroy Gotham (the solar gun thingy and the koolaid in the water supply stuff was just silly to me) then I think it would have been a fab summer movie. The cast was uniformly excellent (nice to see Oldman playing a good guy) although it was a shame that Ken Watanabe didn't have more to do.

miss buenos aires · Post by **miss buenos aires** » Sun Aug 07, 2005 6:50 pm

El Vez wrote:...the way Owen Wilson's character... stalked and obsessed over the would-be love of his life made him look like an unstable creep rather than sympathetically lovelorn.

But Vez, obsessive sympathetically lovelorn types who stalk the would-be loves of their lives are a staple of the whole rom-com genre! I could name you at least twenty movies where I would get a restraining order against the lovable hero, were I in the irresistible heroine's situation. I mean, I can't, but I bet bobster can. And I bet you can, too.

El Vez · Post by **El Vez** » Sun Aug 07, 2005 10:12 pm

But this went beyond what I consider the norm for that sort of thing. Wilson's fallout was dark and creepy in a way that shot straight past my ability to suspend disbelief and I found myself thinking "This guy is a total asshole. He doesn't deserve Rachel McAdams." Granted, the evil, cheating boyfriend that McAdams had to begin with was much, much worse but that didn't change anything for me because Owen's character was still a weird, sulky loser. Maybe John Cusack could have pulled it off but I doubt there's any actor alive who could have made that character sympathetic for me.

Post by **BlueChair** » Mon Aug 08, 2005 7:27 am

Broken Flowers is the best film I've seen so far this year. Jarmusch is in top form, and proves himself talented at directing Bill Murray, not to mention supporting roles from Jeffrey Wright, Frances Conroy (Ruth Fisher from Six Feet Under!), Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange, and Tilda Swinton, and Julie Delpy.

My favorite comment from the reviews I've read is that Jarmusch ended the film 20 minutes earlier than most directors would have dared. So if you like conventional Hollywood storytelling with a tied-together ending, this film probably isn't for you. But if you liked Lost In Translation but want more familiar scenery, I'm sure you'll like this.

bobster · Post by **bobster** » Wed Aug 10, 2005 7:23 pm

El Vez wrote:But this went beyond what I consider the norm for that sort of thing. Wilson's fallout was dark and creepy in a way that shot straight past my ability to suspend disbelief and I found myself thinking "This guy is a total asshole. He doesn't deserve Rachel McAdams." Granted, the evil, cheating boyfriend that McAdams had to begin with was much, much worse but that didn't change anything for me because Owen's character was still a weird, sulky loser. Maybe John Cusack could have pulled it off but I doubt there's any actor alive who could have made that character sympathetic for me.

I didn't have a problem with this because he wasn't really stalking the Rachel M or anything (well, outside of that one attempt to sneak into her engagement party, for which he was duly punished) -- he didn't even play Peter Gabriel on a boombox outside her house late at night or anything, he was just being comically, over-the-top depressed, which is in line with the movie as a whole.

It's also a sort of poetic justice for his behavior earlier in the film. Both him and Vaughn need to be punished a little bit for the whole film to work. That Vaughn falls in love with a literally punishing woman seems pretty appropriate to me.

In fact, both of these reversals made me like the characters more, not less. Once they were pathetic, I found them highly relateable! When they were womanizing successfully, they were just a couple of dispicable liers.

I guess what I liked about it was it's truly "screwball" nature in the sense that there wasn't a sane character in the movie, but the dysfunction was cohorent and not just a license to make no sense as a lot of comedy filmmakers today would have it.

As for restraining order behavior in a romantic comedy...well, Cary Grant pushes Kate Hepburn on the ground comically in "The Philadelphia Story" and he frames poor Ralph Bellamy in "His Girl Friday." The bet at the center of "Guys and Dolls" is certainly not PC....In "Some Like it Hot" (an influence, in a way, on "Wedding Crashers") Tony Curtis impersonates another movie star without a license and completely deceives Marilyn Monroe, he also hijacks a couple of boats....I wish I could remember more. I also wish I could go into the Onion archive, which had once ran a story about a guy jailed for "repeated romantic comedy behavior."

bobster · Post by **bobster** » Wed Aug 10, 2005 7:30 pm

Also gotta disagree a little with the esteemed El Vez over "Batman Begins", though I see his point about the destruction-of-Gotham plot, though I like the fanatism at the heart of it, it's just not quite internally consistent.

Still, I thought that Liam Neeson was an absolutely great villain -- though Cillian Murphy was perhaps even more amazing, I admit -- but it's all very true, right down to Neeson's performance -- to my (extremely vague) memories of the character from the 1970's funny books, and I had to totally dig that.

The only thing that really bothered me was Katie Holmes, who I believe was simply not up to her one crucial scene in the film. Kind of stands out more because everyone else is so great. Still, arguably the best superhero movie ever.

El Vez · Post by **El Vez** » Wed Aug 10, 2005 8:53 pm

Bobster, you ignorant slut.....

bobster · Post by **bobster** » Thu Aug 11, 2005 12:23 am

El Vez, you knowledgeable puritan.

A moment of silence for the late Shana Alexander....

martinfoyle · Post by **martinfoyle** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 6:52 pm

bobster wrote: Still haven't seen "Bigger than Life" -- it was directed by Nicholas Ray, one of my favorite directors, and it's in widescreen black and white, my absolute favorite film format, and James Mason is aces in my book. Hopefully that print or another new one will make its way stateside, perhaps to UCLA's film archive. Wonder if it's available on DVD yet.

According to a piece in yesterdays Guardian, it's due out on dvd soon.

For example, in the next month we shall see in the US the first DVD release of a film many consider to be the masterpiece of Rebel Without a Cause director Nicholas Ray, Bigger Than Life, starring James Mason as a cortisone-addicted teacher whose Nietzschean delusions almost prompt him to sacrifice his own son, Abraham-and-Isaac style. If you're a Ray-niac like me, then you probably already have your samizdat copy. In the UK, you might have taped it off the TV, but not in the US. I got a pristine screener of it for a Ray retrospective years ago, then lent it to a friend who immediately lost it. You'd better believe I made him go on eBay and pay top whack for a replacement. I was merciless, I almost sundered the friendship, but I was right.

bobster · Post by **bobster** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 7:30 pm

Well, I was wrong about it being b&w, it's in color.

I actually started to watch this one off of a taped copy of TCM some months back, but I just wasn't feeling it, but I'll probably give it another chance some time soon, as its Ray and everything. Interesting to see Walter Matthau in sort of a standard "best friend" role, which (considering his looks) he was sort of lucky not to have to do more often.

El Vez · Post by **El Vez** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 7:45 pm

The 40 Year Old Virgin. Really, really good comedy with an actual heart and a brain which only served to make the raunchy stuff that much funnier. I sorta felt like Carrell's character when I stood at the ticket window and said "One for The 40 Year Old Virgin, please." And then I had to go over to the other window and repeat my sad, crushingly ironic request because the first booth's register went on the fritz. Then, not twenty seconds into the opening credits sequence they show Carrell sleeping under a MST3K poster and I nearly had to be carried out in a cold sweat. After that little speed bump, it was smooth sailing for what will probably go down as the funniest film of the year.

Ghost of Ray · Post by **Ghost of Ray** » Sat Aug 20, 2005 11:56 pm

Steve Correll is a remarkably funny man.

The horribly stupid "Anchorman" featured Correll as a completely insane weatherman. He was the sole bright spot of the film. In the American version of the office he is the perfect surrogate to bring the British comedy to an American audience.

Saw the Wedding Crashers and could not discern any comedic chemistry between Owen Wilson and Vince Vaugh. But Correll is a brilliant comic actor with a genuine sense of timing.

Haven't seen 40 Year Virgin but based on your comments...

Finally, I enjoy seeing Jeremy Piven shine so brightly on the HBO comedy called "Entourage". He is perfect. I watch each episode, and as many replays of it as I can, just to enjoy his character.

El Vez · Post by **El Vez** » Sat Sep 03, 2005 4:55 pm

The Constant Gardener - Absolutely breathtaking as entertainment and as grand scale human tragedy.

Tim(e) · Post by **Tim(e)** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 5:30 pm

Well, I'm going to bring the tone of this thread down a tad...

I just watched Kung Fu Hustle on DVD and have to say that it is an absolute hoot... it is like a road-runner cartoon bought to life (without the road-runner and cayote of course, but hopefully you get the drift). It is directed. produced, written and acted by Stephen Chow (who also composed some of the soundtrack) who gave us Shaolin Soccer which is another good romp.

If you want to spend a couple of hours watching relatively mindless action, mind boggling special effects and having a good laugh, go out and rent this on DVD... you cannot go wrong!